On Monday, Britain will start using the British laboratory vaccine, AstraZeneca-Oxford, to become the first country in the world to use this vaccine.
And in the following 5 things that must be known about this vaccine, which was approved by the Medicines Regulatory Authority in India on Sunday, after each of the United Kingdom and Argentina on Wednesday.
1- Inexpensive
One of the most prominent features of the AstraZeneca and University of Oxford vaccine is that its cost is minimal, approximately 2.50 euros per dose (about $ 3), compared to about $ 20 for a dose of Pfizer-BioNTech, and about $ 30 for a dose of Moderna, according to When news sites were reported.
2- Easy to store
The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine requires a temperature between 2 degrees and 8 degrees Celsius, which is the temperature of normal refrigerators, unlike the Moderna and Pfizer-Bionic vaccines, which can only be stored in the long term at very low temperatures, reaching 20 degrees below zero for the first vaccine, and 70 degrees below zero. For the second vaccine.
This facilitates large-scale fertilization.
3- An effective vaccine
The Director General of AstraZeneca Laboratories announced that the vaccine is able to combat the new strain of the emerging corona virus, which has caused a new outbreak of infections in Britain.
"We see at the moment that the vaccine is supposed to be effective" against the new strain, "Pascal Sorrio told the Sunday Times," but this cannot be confirmed, and therefore we will conduct experiments. "
He stressed that new formulas had been prepared in anticipation of any possibility, expressing his hope that there would be no need to use them, but added, "We must be prepared."
4- Very rare side effects
It is the first vaccine that the medical reference journal The Lancet approved its results for efficacy on December 8, declaring in the data it published that AstraZeneca is "safe".
And side effects of the vaccine are very rare in the current stage.
Of the 23,754 volunteers who participated in the experiments, one person who received the vaccine recorded a "serious effect that may be associated" with the injection, according to data released in the journal.
That person developed a rare inflammation of the spinal cord, which led to the trial being temporarily halted in early September.
5- Viral vector
The AstraZeneca vaccine is based on a "viral vector", that is, it is based on another virus that is an adenovirus spread among monkeys, which has been modified and adapted to combat the emerging corona virus.
British authorities have ordered 100 million doses of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, and 520,000 of them will be available Monday, according to the Ministry of Health.
"I am delighted to have released the Oxford vaccine, which was the result of the British flag. This constitutes a shift in our struggle against this terrible virus, and I hope it will restore hope to all people that the end of the pandemic is in sight," said Health Minister Matt Hancock.
Argentina has also licensed the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, and India also licensed it on Sunday, which will allow this country of 1.3 billion people to start one of the largest vaccination campaigns in the world.
However, the approval of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe will not happen in January, according to the European Medicines Agency, and the United States does not intend to approve it before April.